The Pink Dog from Ipanema

So, February was the centennial of one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop. To celebrate, some of her unpublished works are seeing the light along with a travelogue she wrote on Brazil without the edits that she disliked in the original published work.

Speaking of Brazil, what I liked best though was a story on Here and Now about one of the poems she wrote during her time there, "Pink Dog." It was, sadly, the last poem she completed before her death in 1979, although she had started writing it in 1963. Apparently, you can recite it to the tune of "The Girl from Ipanema" for most of the lines. I can't seem to pull it off but the reader on the show did (quelle dommage, his rendition is not in the link.) Here is the poem, see if you can do it:

Pink Dog

[ Rio de Janeiro ]

The sun is blazing and the sky is blue.
Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.
Naked, you trot across the avenue.

Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!
Naked and pink, without a single hair . . .
Startled, the passersby draw back and stare.

Of course they’re mortally afraid of rabies.
You are not mad; you have a case of scabies
but look intelligent. Where are your babies?

(A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.)
In what slum have you hidden them, poor bitch,
while you go begging, living by your wits?

Didn’t you know? It’s been in all the papers,
to solve this problem, how they deal with beggars?
They take and throw them in the tidal rivers.

Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites
go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights
out in the suburbs, where there are no lights.

If they do this to anyone who begs,
drugged, drunk, or sober, with or without legs,
what would they do to sick, four- legged dogs?

In the cafés and on the sidewalk corners
the joke is going round that all the beggars
who can afford them now wear life preservers.

In your condition you would not be able
even to float, much less to dog- paddle.
Now look, the practical, the sensible

solution is to wear a fantasía.*
Tonight you simply can’t afford to be a-
n eyesore. But no one will ever see a

dog in máscara this time of year.
Ash Wednesday’ll come but Carnival is here.
What sambas can you dance? What will you wear?

They say that Carnival’s degenerating
—radios, Americans, or something,
have ruined it completely. They’re just talking.

Carnival is always wonderful!
A depilated dog would not look well.
Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!

 

First and last for Hide and Seek

First:

What a start to the working week.

Last:

He brought out a metal wastepaper bin from beneath the desk, dropped the photographs into it, and lit a match, holding it over the bin, as he had done so many times before.

Final thoughts on Hide and Seek

I just finished the second book in Rankin's Rebus series. I like it well enough. Better than Sue Grafton for example as he deals with real locations and issues. Specifically in this book, the rise of heroin use in Edinburgh and the influx of wealthy Londoners looking for cheaper digs (like Los Angelenos moving to Las Vegas and Phoenix here.) I was curious about a few things.

The author mentions Calton Hill as being an infamous gay cruising site. Apparently, this still is true (you really can find anything on Wikipedia. Traffic cone?) There is also a cemetery there where David Hume is buried.

This is two books in a row (the first being Trainspotting) that mentioned the heroin and AIDS problems in Edinburgh in the early 90's. According to this article, it's making a comeback. At least Edinburgh isn't the AIDS capital of Europe-that's Barcelona, at least as of 2003. Here's another story that takes it full circle, saying Trainspotting is to blame for their specious reputation (funny they mention Begbie though. He was one of the very few abstainers in the book.)

To get these images of the British Isles out of my head (skag use and gentlemen's clubs where junkies are abused for kicks), here's a list of some trivia about Edinburgh's famous Castle, taken from its website:

• The first building on the site was by David I and included a Chapel dedicated to his mother Margaret, in 1130. The St. Margaret Chapel is still standing
• The crown jewels of Scotland, The Honours, are on display there. They were created in the 16th century. They were first used in the coronation of Mary Queen of Scots. They were buried in 1650 to hide them from Oliver Cromwell (not to worry, there's a malaria carrying mosquito with his name on it) and later from the Nazis.
• The Royal Palace is where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James, later King of England.
• Mons Meg, one of the world's oldest cannons at 550 years, is on display there. Although between 1754-1829, the English had it on display at the Tower of London. Thank Sir Walter Scott for convincing the King to return it.

So this is what I get for not reading Astronomy in a few months

I missed the Supermoon on March 18. That is, the moment where the rise of the full moon coincides with its perigee. It appeared 14% larger and a whopping 30% brighter.

First and last lines for Trainspotting

First:

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. 

Last:

Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be. He'd stand or fall alone. This though terrified and excited him as he contemplated life in Amsterdam.

Final thoughts on Trainspotting

Ok, I'm glad I stuck this out. After the story about the baby dying and Sick Boy shooting dogs in the park to make them bite their owners, I really was ready to fuck off. Also, lots of stories about dirty knobs which isn't too surprising given this is a story about a bunch of skag addicts but, gross. Compelling reading at least. Also, I learned you can lose a limb if you inject into your artery instead of your vein. How the hell do you even do that? If you are really curious, here is more information.

Here were some of my favorites for various reasons:

• The Skag Boys, Jean Claude Van Damme and Mother Superior: Rents and Sick Boy go to score from the White Swan, a former mate and once promising soccer player that's been on junk so long his nickname is Mother Superior. While Sick Boy inevitably finds a girl willing to shag him, Rents is anxious to return home and finish his Van Damme film.
• The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival: The sequence I remember best from the movie (other than dead baby scene). Rents tries to kick and instead goes to see a dealer and scores some suppositories to ease his withdrawal. Alas, he soon has an attack of withdrawal-related diarrhea and shits them out into the world's most disgusting toilet and has to fish them out. And then he sticks them right back in the place where suppositories go. Who still wants to do heroin now, kids?
• Growing Up in Public: Nina (Renton's cousin) deals with her period and a death in the family. Who knew that electric blankets could make a corpse sweat?
• Cock Problems: just what it says. Rents decides he's run out of veins and has been using his junk for junk.
• Na Na and Other Nazis: oh, poor sensitive Spud. Here he narrates his family tree. Hilarious and riveting.
• The First Shag in Ages: Rents picks up a girl and FINALLY gets some action. Alas, she has a secret that leads to an awkward family breakfast.
• Strolling Through the Meadows: Spud again is horrified by the violence of the world he shares with Rents and Sick Boy
• House Arrest: Rents' parents force him to kick. In his withdrawal delirium, he is visited by the now clean Sick Boy and the ghost of Sick Boy's dead bairn.
• Bang to Rites: Rents is not really that sad at the wake of his brother who died in military service in Northern Ireland. This leads him to start a fight with a distant family member and shag his brother's widow in the restroom. 
• Bad Blood: the occasionally mentioned Tom (one of the very few non-junkie or criminal characters) makes an appearance in this story of how he takes revenge on the very bad man who, indirectly, gave him AIDS.
• There is a Light That Never Goes Out: a night on the town ends with a girl finally taking an interest in Spud
• Feeling Free: after all the misogynous claptrap, a great story of Allison and Kelly engaging in some female bonding
• The Elusive Mr. Hunt: why that famous scene from Porky's isn't always so funny. Is Mike Hunt in the parking lot?
• A Leg-Over Situation: The White Swan loses any hopes of a soccer career by turning to his arteries after his veins no longer suffice.  He then considers whether the abscess where his leg used to be would make a good injection site (er, no) and why Allison wouldn't blow him just because he has a filthy knob when she owes him after all. 
• Winter in West Granton: Rents is clean but his mate Tommy who first tried smack with him is not. And he has AIDS. People in the projects are not obliging of his illness. 
• Station to Station: a scam to sell a shitload of heroin in London gives Mark the opportunity to make a clean break at his buddies' expense.

A great line from Fitzgerald

We read This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald for book club this month. I don't even think I wrote about it on here. The book made almost no impression on me except I was annoyed. When your chosen metier is the tragic ennui of rich white people, your writing had better be pitch perfect or your readers are likely to react with, "Tell it to your polo pony, Captain Abercrombie."

So I went back and read "Winter Dreams" recently, his most famous short story which I had read in high school and remembered almost nothing about. It's available online here. Fitzgerald wrote it in 1922, which means about three years after Paradise was written and two years after it was published. He had already markedly improved. It was good to go back and read this. Paradise was so lackluster that it made me wonder if I overestimated Gatsby.

Fitzgerald, other than hewing close to the autobiographical well for materials, liked to write about the death of the spirit. I think that's nicely encapsulated here in the final line of Winter Dreams when Dexter learns 5 years later that Judy Jones is married to a man who drinks and treats her poorly and has lost the looks that made her so singular:

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."